


always fear the deep

by chameleontattoos



Category: B.A.P
Genre: Body Horror, Drowning, Merpeople, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-15 05:15:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12314484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chameleontattoos/pseuds/chameleontattoos
Summary: the denizens of the world under the sea aren't always disney-friendly.





	always fear the deep

It’s cold in the ocean.

Of course it’s cold, you get deeper than three feet into the sea when you go to the beach and suddenly all the warmth is sucked out of your legs. The ocean is a cold place.

Maybe it’s the salt that stops it from warming. Junhong didn’t pay much attention in chemistry. Not his favourite subject at school.

The point is, it’s cold in the ocean. Freezing cold. Especially way, way out, where no land is even faintly visible.

Junhong’s not sure how long he’s been treading water. Hours, maybe.

To say he’s been treading water for hours might be a smidge generous. He trod water for the first half an hour and he’s spent the rest of it with his legs just hanging suspended in the cold, salty water. Like the thick, mutated tentacles of a bluebottle jellyfish. His legs are the tentacles, and the rest of him is the weird transparent-but-also-blue taco-shaped floaty part that hangs out above the surface of the water.

He’s probably going to die. He doesn’t like that one bit, but there’s not much he can do about it. The spare dinghy went down with the ship.

Well. Yacht. Went down with the stupidly expensive French yacht that for some reason Junhong was a passenger on despite knowing exactly six words in French, and that’s not even important, it’s just that he needs to think about something to stop himself from having an all-out freak-out about the fact that he’s literally going to die out here, in the ass-crack middle of the ocean, and nobody is ever going to find his body because it’ll have sunk to the bottom after being torn to pieces by sharks and shrimp.

Stupid boat shouldn’t even have been allowed out of the marina with defective dinghy-release clamps, or whatever the absolute fuck is used to keep dinghies attached to their stupidly expensive French-manufactured yacht parent vessels.

He used to have a piece of boat to hang onto, but he accidentally tipped it too far to one side and the air pocket that was keeping it afloat came up to the surface with a great big _sploop_ and it capsized and went under. So now he’s just floating. Like a jellyfish.

Something brushes his ankle. Does floating seaweed exist this far out?

It must, surely. The floating seaweed at the beach has to come from somewhere. And now – yeah, he’s remembering. Yongguk told him one time about the kelp forests that grow out of the sea floor.

The tickly sensation happens again.

Isn’t it too deep here for kelp forests? It has to be. Maybe it’s not seaweed, then. Maybe it’s a fish. Maybe a bluebottle jellyfish, if he’s super lucky. Maybe if he kicks it enough, it’ll get angry at him and sting him so much that he dies. Early, before the dehydration and starvation get him and all the salt he’s probably absorbing through his skin poisons him to death.

He kicks out. His foot doesn’t connect with anything, unless you count water as ‘anything’. Which he doesn’t. So he kicks again.

He hits something this time. Oh boy, does he hit something. It’s solid, and definitely was not there two minutes ago. Which does not make sense, because everything solid that isn’t a person sunk below the limits of human visibility twenty minutes after the entire crew of the stupidly expensive French yacht apparently all lost their goddamn minds and jumped overboard to scuttle their own goddamn boat. After which they all dove underwater, and Junhong was left all alone to watch as each of the bubble-patches that marked how many people were down there vanished, one by one. Twenty… thirteen… six… five…

Junhong has a feeling the weird buzzy singy sounds might have had something to do with that. He doesn’t understand why he didn’t also jump overboard and assist in opening all the bilges to flood the hold. Maybe they were supposed to sound less annoyingly buzzy and more pleasantly singy, and the fact that he heard _more_ buzzy and _less_ singy was the reason why it didn’t work.

He kicks out a third time, just to make sure he isn’t imagining large solid masses being out here in the big blue nowhere.

He isn’t. He knows this, because the large solid mass grabs –

Oh, shit. _Grabs his ankle_.

What is out here that has ankle-grabbing capabilities? Sentient seaweed?

Whatever it is, it yanks on his leg, and no amount of absolutely shithouse weakling resistance from him is enough to stop it dragging him down.

What was the point of going to the 24-hour gym at 3am when he couldn’t sleep for all those months if he can’t stop himself from being kidnapped-slash-drowned? Honestly.

The surface is disappearing above him at an alarming rate. He kicks at his new friend with his free leg, trying to scare it into letting him go before he gets too down deep to reach the surface with his limited lung capacity. He does a terrible job. Who knew trying to kick fast through salt water was like trying to kick through molasses?

Junhong definitely does, he’s just also apparently a giant idiot who tried to do it anyway. All he gets out of it is the appearance of another grabby appendage that latches onto his kicking leg and pins his ankles together. It feels like an octopus. A big, murderous octopus.

It’s even colder down deep. Colder, and dark. Not even dark _er_ , just. Dark.

His eyes burn from the salt. He keeps them open, because at this point, why not? He’ll be dead before he goes blind, or whatever happens to people who are stupid and keep their bare naked un-goggled eyes open underwater in the ocean.

His chest is on fire, fighting to keep his feeble oxygen supply inside his body as opposed to outside where the only good it’ll do is make bubbles that the fish won’t even enjoy. His brain is telling him he needs to release what’s in there and take another breath. He really doesn’t want to.

Something slams him in the chest, startling the absolute daylights out of him, and the decision is taken out of his hands. The seawater freezer-burns his mouth, his nose, his trachea as it goes down. Instinct kicks in, tells him he needs to get the water out of his lungs. He coughs, but unfortunately what happens when you cough underwater is that more water comes in.

He’s scared. He’s so scared. It’s so dark. It’s dark, it’s cold, he’s alone, everyone else is dead – is that a face?

It comes closer. It’s definitely a face.

Not just a face. A human face. Or at least humanoid. It gives off its own faint luminescence, lighting its features just enough that he can make out a pair of huge dark eyes, nose slits, gills.

Gills. Christ. He’s lost it. His sanity has ponied off, left him alone to face the deep dark depths of the ocean and make squid butts look like people’s faces.

Except the squid butt has hair. Dark, and short. It drifts around the squid-butt-face like a halo. There’s a tiny speck of green-blue-white glow underneath one of its eyes, like some kind of freckle in negative.

And squid don’t have gill slits. They definitely don’t have gill slits, nor do they have grasping, webby hands. Or dolphin tails. Dolphin tails belong on dolphins, not on squid.

Nor, last Junhong checked, do squid have mouths on their butts. Mouths that open so wide it should be impossible for something that looks so much like a human being.

The gallons of water he inhaled are catching up with him. His vision starts to go dark.

He’s too tired to be scared now. Too tired. So tired.

The creature’s mouth has a lot of pointy teeth. Lots and lots of tiny needles. Mini shark teeth.

So tired.

Singing.

Tired.

Cold.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in an apparent fit of madness all in one go in... two hours. yeesh  
> i will be writing more bap fic and this wasn't supposed to happen but it was in my ideas list and my brain wanted me to do it so i did it. i'm scared that if i leave it until the morning to re-read for edits i'll end up hating it, so here it is now, probably garbage. but that's fine  
> as always PLEASE tell me what you think!! have a good night everyone


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